FO – NASCAR “Baby” Quilt

Remember the NASCAR themed baby quilt I was making last fall? Well a happy, healthy baby boy was born to our friends December 16. I’d been told there wasn’t a rush on the quilt so I put it aside to finish Christmas crafting and to sneak in a last-minute request from someone for a handmade gift. 🙂

I’d been fretting about laying out and pinning the quilt and then quilting it and how so ever very long it was going to take me. I am really good at that, building things up into a huge hopeless matter than can never be overcome. So, Saturday since I wasn’t in the mood to even so much as leave the house (I spent all of last week in Dallas) I kicked myself in the dupa and got Chris to help me layout the quilt to pin it. We started to pin it when I realized that the plan to quilt from the backside meant I couldn’t pin from the front side so I put on proper clothes and rushed out to buy some spray basting. Best invention ever. When we got home Chris and I basted the quilt in 10 minutes flat.

Sunday morning I woke up at 8am (as usual, because apparently I am now old) and went straight into the office to quilt. By just after 10am I was finishing the last bit of quilting to ensure I had no more than 5″ or so gaps in the quilting and rushed off to yoga. Which, was kind of amazing to do after being hunched over a sewing machine for 2 hours. After lunch I cut the binding and attached it – finishing attaching right as my in-laws pulled into the driveway for a visit. This was perfect timing because our dear friend has a dog allergy so we were sending the quilt home with Chris’ parents to be washed before gifting, because it’s impossible to protect against dog hair in our house.

I bet you want to see some photos?

Ta DA!

I love it. We delivered the quilt Monday night and the parents were quite pleased. I am quite chuffed that it was only a month “late”. That’s a better record than some of the other baby blankets that uhh were never even given, that I, uh, may still be knitting for myself as lap blankets now…

Full frontal:

Full back:

This will be a perfect play mat with the little race cars we gave him. He’ll be able to race around on his quilt while his parents watch NASCAR races. 🙂 Oh and as for the final dimensions it’s not quite a twin size quilt. It just covers the top of my full bed with no overhang. So it should do nicely on a twin bed.

I have two large quilts lined up for our home this year – the 1080 quilt (1080 – 2.5″ squares sewn together) and a Farmer’s Wife quilt. The Farmer’s Wife quilt may end up being a 2 year project. we shall see. It may just be that I need to just get out of my head and in front of the machine so my projects can produce themselves.

I’d also like to find a couple quick quilt projects as well for throw quilts.